Tech Won't Save Us - How Foreverism Degrades Our Culture w/ Grafton Tanner

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss the dangers and consequences of companies and politicians leveraging nostalgia for their own purposes. Grafton Tanner is the author of Foreverism. He also teaches at the University of Georgia.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode: Paris wrote about the material footprint of data centers in Disconnect.Ian McKellen broke down on the set of The Hobbit after acting with no other actors on a green screen.In an interview with Charlie Rose, George Lucas described differences between Soviet and US film industries.Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Vanity Fair it wasn’t as fun making Star Wars films today as it was making the original trilogy.Jake Gyllenhaal described the difficulty of acting in a Marvel film after Spider-Man: Far From Home.Support the show

You do have to wonder who is enjoying this. If the fans are dedicating whole podcast episodes to picking apart the latest reboot and the people making it, as you say, are not having a great time either, then who is this for? And it does start to feel a little bit like the bitter medicine. I don't care if you're feeling nostalgic. You're going to take this medicine. We're going to cure you with these leeches or whatever to get that emotion out of you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Grafton Tanner. Grafton is the author of Foreverism and teaches at the University of Georgia. Now, this was a really fun conversation. Grafton's been on the show before where we've talked about not only the effect of nostalgia on our society, but what Grafton calls foreverism, which kind of builds on this idea so that nostalgia is, you know, kind of looking to the past, longing for this part of the past. But foreverism is kind of keeping that past or keeping these ideas fully present all the time so they can keep being consumed and consumed and consumed over again in the way that we see with false ideas of the past being exhumed for political purposes or, of course, intellectual property and these cultural franchises constantly churning out new films and television shows and what have you in order for us

to keep watching them, in order for us to keep buying more things, because that is what works for these companies that own them and that profit from them. And so this led to a really fascinating conversation, I thought, on the impact that this really has and whether it ultimately even works. If we look at, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the Star Wars movies that Disney has been making in recent years, are we really kind of watching those and constantly engaging with those or are people becoming bored with it? So is this strategy one that actually makes commercial sense, let alone cultural sense, as it feels like the culture becomes stagnant because there's this commercial focus on constantly just remaking these old stories. It's something that has been on my mind a lot lately, as I discuss in the interview,

because for better or worse, I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan. And I feel like every single time they make one of these new kind of properties in Middle Earth or what have you, that it diminishes what is already there because it can never really hold up to the originals or the first trilogy made by Peter Jackson and things like that. So anyway, I think that's all you need to know about me going into this episode. If you do enjoy it, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. You can also share the interview on social media or with any friends or colleagues who

you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making this show every week, if you want to get some stickers with the Tech Won't Save Us logo on it and a shout out on a future episode of the show, you can join supporters like Philip in Copenhagen, Mike in Berlin, Eric from San Jose, and Ben from Hampshire in the UK by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter yourself. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Grafton, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, thanks so much for having me again. You know, in the past, we talked about nostalgia, its relationship to technology, to politics,

all these other important questions that we're dealing with today. And I'm sure listeners of the show will be very familiar with hearing these discourses around nostalgia kind of infecting our society, kind of being everywhere. And I wonder how what you set out to do in this book compared to or kind of built on what you were doing in those previous books when you were kind of digging into these topics and these concepts around nostalgia? Yes. So the last book that I wrote was called The Hours of Lost Their Clock, and it was a book-length exploration of the history of nostalgia, how the emotion is used in politics and in culture,

and just like my attempt at an intervention into the study of nostalgia. And in that book, I made the argument that we live in a relatively nostalgic society. There's plenty of reasons why human beings would experience nostalgia in our world today. And we may have a problem with it. There's lots of problematic aspects of the way this emotion has been used, just like something like anger is very similar. And we may have a lot of issues with it, but we ought to take it a little seriously because

it's something that might not just go away, especially in a world in which there's problems at the economic level, problems in terms of major world-shaking events like the COVID-19 pandemic, and people feeling generally unstable across the world. And nostalgia is this emotional reaction to instability. Therefore, plenty of people likely are going to continue reaction to instability. Therefore, plenty of people likely are going to continue feeling this emotion. Therefore, we should take it seriously. And so I made that argument in the last book. And so in this latest book, I decided to kind of take that argument and turn it upside down and shake it and just kind of see what fell out. Well,

what if it's the opposite, in fact? What if instead of a society in which nostalgia is relatively evenly distributed because it's a human emotion, maybe it's the opposite. Maybe it's that nostalgia is this thing that's kind of targeted in an attempt to eradicate it. And if so, then what does that look like when we really think about it? And it's kind of an experiment of a book in that way, and that I could be wrong, but it's a different approach to something that I think I and a lot of other people maybe have taken for granted when it comes to the study of nostalgia. Yeah, I think that's really fair. And I would say, like, going into it, I was a bit skeptical, you know, I was like, wait, so we're not talking

about nostalgia now? Like, what are we getting into? And we can discuss like the larger concept that, you know, you end up laying out in the book. And of course, we'll dig into that further. But I was hoping that before we did that, that you could take us into that history a little bit, right? Because in the book, and of course, in the past book, you talked about, you know, this history of nostalgia. But in particular, I was interested in this moment in the 20th century, where we started to see this reframing of nostalgia from this kind of more medicalized term or idea to something that is really commercialized and taken by capitalism, taken into kind of marketing companies and redeployed as something to try to sell products to people, basically. Can you talk about that moment and

that shift? Definitely. So the typical history of nostalgia is that it shows up as a word in the late 1600s. It's created in a medical context. It's conceived of as a kind of disease. For several hundred years, it's framed as a disease, as something that needs to be cured out of people. And of course, it's not just a disease, but it's also a way to channel old prejudices. So during the 1700s, 1800s, even into the early 1900s, nostalgia is a disease that only some folks are predisposed to, typically women, people of color, immigrants, soldiers who were considered weak in the eyes of the military who yearned for home and weren't just ready to go to battle at a moment's notice its functions like that for a long time. And for a long time, it's this thing that the kind of white male technocratic society is trying to eliminate for a long time. And according to the usual history of nostalgia, at some point in maybe the 20th century, it could be a little bit before then.

It's somewhere between the end of the 19th century into the first half of the 20th century. There is this shift in which nostalgia is no longer considered a disease. It becomes demedicalized and then picked up by the world of marketing and consumer capitalism as this nifty new tool that could be used to market products that appeal to people's sense of the past. Then you there you, you know, then you start to see, you know, movies that are set in, you know, a vaguely defined past era and products that appeal to like older sensibilities in terms of like older fonts that are used on cereal boxes and older styles of music that reappear in new ways, but it's still obviously a little bit old. And that's the world that we live in now. And, you know, when I teach my students about nostalgia, everybody in the class is nodding along because they all understand the chokehold, if you will,

that the emotion has on consumer capitalism. What I wanted to think about in this book, Foreverism, is to go, what if that shift is not the kind of shift that maybe we think it is? It goes from this medical concern that needs to be gotten rid of to instead something that suddenly becomes this commodity that we want people to indulge in and then purchase. So when you go to watch an old, you know, either a reboot of a movie or an older movie, you're indulging in a little bit of nostalgia and that's like maybe going to make you more nostalgic. And then therefore, the more nostalgic you are, the more you might purchase these old objects and products. I kind of wanted to say, what if the way that the marketing world treats nostalgia today is actually the same way that the medical world treated nostalgia a really long time ago, which is this thing that needs to be kind of gotten rid of?

And if so, what would that look like? And to me, it would look like maybe instead of Amazon and Hulu and Paramount and Disney trying to sell people nostalgia, maybe instead what they're doing is just selling the past so that people aren't nostalgic for it any longer. They have access to it all the time. Why would they yearn for it if they have access to every rebooted Star Wars movie or something? And that's sort of where the book kind of came from was that thought experiment. So break that down for us a little bit more. As you say, the book is called Foreverism. And this is a concept that you lay out kind of as opposed to or in addition to nostalgia. So how does this work? And how is it distinct from, you know, the nostalgic practices that we're used to associating with this term or things that

we're used to calling nostalgia that maybe you would position in a different way? It starts by, I guess, like a basic definition of what nostalgia is, which for me is a human emotion that's experienced when we encounter something that isn't normally encountered in the present. It could just be in our minds, like a memory of something from the past that is no longer in our world anymore. Or maybe it's encountering something like an old car or something that's been restored and we see it. It's not normally seen in our day-to-day life.

And so when we see it, we feel that tug toward the past. And I kind of asked this question about the rebooting of the Star Wars franchise and the endless sort of series and movies that are being made about Star Wars today. Although there haven't been quite as many recently, but there was a lot there for a few years. I had this thought where I was like, every time there's a new Star Wars reboot that's released, there is a lot of discourse about the nostalgia of the series. Sometimes it was me joining in the discourse and saying, oh, this is just a bunch of nostalgia. What is this? And sometimes it's people praising the nostalgia. Oh, the feeling of watching the original again, and now we get to relive it

over and over again in all of these reboots. And I kind of asked this question, like, if nostalgia is a feeling associated with encountering something that isn't normally present in our lives, how could someone be nostalgic for Star Wars when there's a new movie or series being released kind of all the time? In some ways, it is kind of a normalized product in our present, maybe even more so than it was 20 or 30 years ago, when Disney hadn't bought it yet. And so in that way, I kind of thought, well, if so, then what we're consuming isn't nostalgia, but perhaps maybe another kind of tactic. And that's where the word foreverism comes from, is a kind of a marketing strategy to bring back old things, place them in the present,

and then kind of prevent them from ever disappearing and allowing them or forcing them to kind of grow forever in a sense so that nobody misses Star Wars or nobody misses the past ever again. And so I guess the distinction there is kind of like if I, you know, liked Star Wars and I still had, you know, the original trilogy, you know, maybe I have my VHS tapes or I bought them on DVD or whatever. And I occasionally watch those and I was like, man, these are some great movies. And then I like put them back in my cabinet and that was it until I watched them six months or a year later. But then the distinction there, I guess, is that what you talk about with foreverism is, you know, you're not just pulling out your old tapes and watching them over and over again. But now, of course, there are constantly new products, you know, picking up on this franchise, picking up on this IP. So you can constantly be buying new things, be consuming new

things as a result of it. So picking up on that, like that connection to it, but it's not really nostalgic in the sense because you're not thinking back or like, just saying like, Oh, I love the original trilogy, but there's always something new, whether it's the Yoda show or whatever. So, you know, the young Yoda or whatever, I don't watch them, clearly. But, you know, you keep consuming these things. And of course, then Disney can sell you the toys and all the other things as well. And so I guess this is kind of what you would see as the distinction between the two, right? There's one, the original thing, but it can't just be the original thing because now you need to keep making more and more and more and selling it. And this is the

distinction between the two. Is that right? Yes, that's exactly it. Yeah. So I remember being alive, you know, back before the prequel trilogy of Star Wars, if I wanted to watch those movies, I could pick them up and yeah, VHS tapes, put them on and watch them. But that was it. I mean, yeah, I could go maybe read novelizations of it or something like that. But in terms of the big ticket items, the movies themselves, that was basically it. I mean, there weren't any other films. And so to foreverize Star Wars would then be to essentially create new stories based off the old intellectual property itself so that it never kind of disappears.

And then therefore, people don't experience that longing for it anymore. It doesn't mean that the nostalgia doesn't prompt them to seek out the new stories. It very much can do that. And it also doesn't mean that a foreverized product doesn't accomplish its goal of eradicating nostalgia forever. In fact, that's one of the points in the book is that just like how the doctors back hundreds of years ago were trying to eliminate nostalgia and couldn't, you know, marketing companies today by giving people what they think they long for can't also eliminate the conditions for nostalgia either. In some ways, it backfires and actually makes it worse. And that's part of the foreverism process. In fact, it's sort of built into it. Plenty of people watch Baby Yoda or

whatever, and some of these series, and they get really kind of critical of them. And you know, you all you have to do is spend a little time on like, I don't know if you've done this, but I have for research purposes only solely for research. Yeah. It's like listening to some of the Star Wars dedicated podcasts and the YouTube channels in which all they do is just criticize the newer installments in the franchise. And I mean, to me, that's not a problem to a foreverist institution like Disney. They like that. It's like, there's no such thing as bad publicity. As long as you're talking about it, it doesn't really matter. So that's sort of another angle to the argument.

That's interesting because I did want to ask you about this, right? So Star Wars, listen, I was a Star Wars kid. I grew up on it. My dad, my uncle, everyone had me watching Star Wars. My whole family was into it. My mom, my stepmom, everybody. But my big thing is Lord of the Rings, okay? I love Lord of the Rings. and that trilogy was like everything to me. Of course I read the books, love the books, but it really was the films that kind of introduced me to it. Right. And then of course the experience with Lord of the Rings is similar to so many of these other franchises or intellectual properties where, you know, it couldn't just be the one trilogy that did really well, that won the bunch of Oscars and made the money. You had to have the Hobbit trilogy, which, you know, I think was terrible. And now, of course,

you have the Amazon television show, which looks beautiful, but has a terrible story. It doesn't make any sense, really, I think. And so I feel like the more that these companies try to exploit these intellectual properties by keeping them present, by constantly trying to churn out more and more, they actually degrade the property itself and potentially, you know, the nostalgia that people feel for it in the sense that Star Wars for me is not nearly what it was when I was younger. I don't even really long to watch the original trilogy anymore because I feel like it's been so degraded. And I feel like you see, you know, even with the Marvel films, people slowly kind of just getting tired of those. Harry Potter as well, you know, you had the original film trilogy that people were really into. And then you had the

Fantastic Beasts trilogy, which people really were not into. And of course, you know, then there's some personal things with J.K. Rowling's transphobia that are turning people off of that as well. But I think even without that, there would have been kind of a waning of interest because of the way that the property has been exploited. So I wonder what you make of that, because on the one hand, you're talking about how the kind of foreverist impulse is to constantly be making more and more. But it seems like the more that they do that, the more it actually degrades that interest in the product as well.

It's true. And in fact, that's even an experience on the creator side of things. So I've got this interview in the book where Kathleen Kennedy, I guess she's still the CEO of Lucasfilm at this point. I think so. I think she's still involved. She's like head producer or something. Yeah, yeah.

So she's up there and working closely with George Lucas. And she's got this interview in Vanity Fair where they actually talk about their approach to Star Wars. And they're just going to kind of do that until maybe it runs out of steam or something. She got nominated for some award, I can't remember. And they created a highlight reel over the decades of her and George Lucas teaming up together to make these movies. And she said, I saw this photo of us from back in the early days of Star Wars, and we were having so much fun. And it's like, there's nostalgia. Having so much fun. And it seems like a lot of that enjoyment's been leeched out of you know, leeched out of us through this persistent storytelling process that occurs on the fan end as well. You know, like sometimes it's, people will be a bit critical of me for going after things like star Wars or Marvel films or whatever, because it's like, they seem like easy

targets. Oh, it's fantasy be real. That's not it. It's it's I was also a fan of star Wars as a younger person. And it's more or less the feeling of almost too much of a good thing. Why do I feel so turned off to this thing that I once really enjoyed? And it's like, well, honestly, it could have been anything. It could have been my favorite band. It could have been my favorite books or whatever that are then turned into a McDonald's franchise, if you will. There's some sort of like gut emotional reaction to watching something that you like in part because it's limited, get turned into a forever product. And I think that's been a driving force behind this project.

A foreverized product is not like the result of a mass demand for it. We all just want more. It's more or less a decision made on the creative side of things. We can make more money by just marketing this intellectual property and franchising it until it doesn't make money anymore. So let's try that. Just to add to what you're saying about the creative side or like, you know, the Kathleen Kennedy kind of position, there was an interview that George Lucas gave a number of years ago as well, which I'm sure I've mentioned on the show before, because I tend to do that. But he's essentially talking about the difference between making films in the United States versus the Soviet Union. And he was basically talking to people in the

Soviet Union and saying, you know, about, you know, what went into making films. And he said, you know, in the Soviet Union, you couldn't criticize the government, like that was a clear restriction. But beyond that, you were pretty open to doing whatever you wanted with your films. And he said, in America, we act like we have this kind of full freedom. We can do whatever we want. Sure. We can criticize the government, but there's also this kind of restriction that commercialism places on what you can actually do with a film and what's going to be marketable and what's going to be picked up by a studio and kind of put in all the cinemas and stuff like that. And he said that that line of commercialism is constantly getting smaller, like the room that it allows you in order

to explore different things becomes more narrow over time. And I think that just reflecting on what he said and looking at the properties that we have in the sense that you have these companies like Disney that are constantly trying to exploit and exploit and exploit the properties that they own that are popular. And you see the ability of what they can do with those properties become more narrow. You see the quality decline in terms of what they can produce. And then, of course, you also see, I think the audience interest be reduced as well. And I don't think that there's a proper response to that on the company's end. Exactly. Yeah. Well, except to just to keep doing it, you know, maybe. Well, that's the thing too, I really thought about when I was writing this book was I was like,

well, you know, I'm over here, you know, using Star Wars as an example. And yet it's been like kind of eerily quiet, quieter, I should say, maybe than it has been over the past few years with the Disney-fied version of Star Wars. But the thing is, I guess it kind of remains to be seen to what extent this will continue to be a trend in filmmaking or in the production of streaming series or TV series. And it could not be. This could be maybe just like a strange fad or whatever of the 2010s. But what I ultimately wanted to do was think about

what nostalgia's relationship is to that. And is it the case that these products actually are the result of a nostalgic demand for them? Do they actually cause us to feel nostalgia, something that might be really hard to determine? Or in fact, is it just kind of a new spin on an old method to try to prevent people from experiencing a discomforting feeling of, man, that thing that used to be around is not around anymore. And I kind of liked it, you know, and where did it go? Well, here it is, here it is in full, you know, it's

almost like continuing to eat something, even though you're not hungry anymore, but just because it's there or something. And that isn't necessarily an audience response. It's kind of a corporate endeavor. It could just be a trend, or it could be like you say, maybe a brief pause before it ramps up again. I find what you say there really interesting, because when I think about how I engage with these stories that I'm really into, you know, whether it's the Lord of the Rings or I just finished watching Star Trek, Deep Space Nine. And so I spent like the whole of 2023, basically like slowly making my way through this series and like getting to know these characters. And at the end, there's, there's this satisfaction of like completing the story. But there's also, in a sense, this longing where like, okay, my relationship with these people or whatever is over now because their story for me has ended. And I think you can see that in a lot of things, right? It pulls people into these products, at least when these companies are starting to make them again, if they haven't been made for a long time. So it does have this draw.

But then the more and more that they kind of take advantage of this feeling of longing, I think, the more it degrades it and the more that you feel like, you know, I'm not drawn to this anymore. I don't feel this desire to come back because this feeling that I had with the original thing or the first time that I experienced it is totally gone because what they're making in its place does not feel like what was made originally. Completely. And I know that feeling as well too and wanting a series or a movie to continue, but it is actually like that feeling

that's kind of part of the combination of feelings that go into a person like really enjoying something, whether it's your favorite band or favorite musical artist or even your favorite writer. And so we can use artificial intelligence to create more songs by that person or to write more Shakespearean plays or something. But it is almost like one encountering the uncanny valley version of it. And it could be that it meets that need that people want for more of the same thing, but it just poses a ton of questions and problems, I think, in terms of ownership of one's name,

image, and likeness, to use the term from sports. Whether or not it's a good thing to have a deceased person's voice continue to communicate with us, not to mention the physical, material, environmental impact of the technologies that need to be in place to allow that kind of proliferation of dead voices. And then what that does to our idea of aging, getting older, death itself. Yeah, no character can ever go away or get old. They have to constantly reappear and use these technologies in order to enable them to do so. And I wanted to stick on this question of culture for just a second, right? Because we've been talking about

how there's this desire to constantly kind of recreate these properties and create new entries into these intellectual properties and these to create new entries into these franchises. You know, one thing that I've noticed, of course, just following this, and it's reflected in your book as well, is that this also changes or puts pressure on the production process, right? Where you have these incentives to use these technologies to make it easier to constantly churn out these new entries in these series. And so you have the creation of these virtual environments, these different kinds of sets, the other technologies that go into this. Can you talk a bit about that element of this and how it actually changes how these things are made, which might also contribute to the poorer quality of what we see?

Yeah, totally. And one of the starting pieces of the book was the one or two interviews that Ian McKellen did after starring in The Hobbit. His experience of that versus his experience on The Lord of the Rings, there's that very famous image of him in the green screen set with his head in his hands trying to act. And it's this really surreal glimpse into a world that I'm not very familiar with, which is just like, what is it like know be alone in a green screen set with these i think he described him as almost like sticks that were set up with the images taped to the like the faces of the different hobbits taped to the sticks with like a light bulb behind it and every time a hobbit would speak they would light up the bulb behind the stick so he would look in that direction they and then they filmed that and them and And the post production process actually applied the digital world on top of it. And in the interviews that

he gave around that time, he was like, I broke down and I cried. It was really taxing on me, not just as an actor, but as a person to have to like, it's bad enough to do like long days of shooting, you know, but how about long days of shooting without anybody around in a green cell essentially, you know? And so companies like Disney have tried to get around that by creating But how about long days of shooting without anybody around in a green cell, essentially? And so companies like Disney have tried to get around that by creating, instead of green screen sets, LED screen sets. One of their technologies they have is called the volume. And it's essentially just a big set of screens that they could cast the image of where they are, the landscape, digitally rendered landscape up on the screens around the actor. So it feels like they're at least in some sort of context other than a green set. But the production crew on these movies have to be

ready at a moment's notice to kind of alter the set and make changes. And that can be taxing too. There's another interview that I cite with Jake Gyllenhaal about how quickly on the Marvel sets, how quickly like scripts can change and dialogue can change at a moment's notice, simply because what they're dealing with is so at its core, a digital form of filmmaking. And so therefore a form of filmmaking that allows for more micro coordination at any moment. And so it's very, it's very unstable process in some ways, maybe even unstable than the old days of the, of the film reel running out and everybody having to pause and they reload the camera or something. At least you got a little break then, right? Yeah, exactly. It is a, is a break and everyone from the crew up to the, the, you know,

millionaire actors who, you know, when they complain, I tend not to pay much attention to it either, but it is sort of interesting to hear their perspective that all of them are having to sort of create this product that's very unstable simply because it's so digitalized that it allows for on the fly, last minute kind of production rewrites in order to keep everything straight, which is also a problem too. Once you stretch that franchise out long enough and it gets so complicated, it literally becomes the word universe really is fitting, even though it is kind of a euphemism. So much has to be kept straight. And it's like, if we find a continuity error, then everything's got to be rewritten right here at the last moment. It's very taxing. No wonder Kathleen Kennedy is in interviews being like, you know, I don't really have a whole lot of fun doing this anymore. It's fascinating to them because like, obviously you have, you're talking about the actors and stuff, talking about what it means for them and how it's not what they expected when they got into this craft to be on these green screens, you know, talking to fake markers,

not having this interaction with a proper set around them because everything is digitalized. But then of course you have the workers on the set, like the writers who were on strike last year, the actors who are not, you know, the big names like the Jake Gyllenhaals and the Ian McKellans, the visual effects workers, of course, who talk about being pressured immensely in particular by Disney in order to kind of turn around these effects really quickly. And it's like, so we have this system where the public is not liking what is being churned out of it as much. Like, sure, they'll go to see it because they want to see something and maybe they've seen some of the rest, but people are becoming less and less interested in what's coming out and less and less impressed by the quality of the media and

entertainment that they're receiving. And meanwhile, everyone on the back end is kind of like increasingly hating this process as well. And it's all just to serve the need for these companies to keep making money off of properties that they know we have these like historical ties to. It just feels so broken. It does, it really, it starts to feel, and I note this in the book, like sometimes I don't engage too much with these products

because it just, to be honest with you, it just doesn't interest me. It's not an enjoyable experience to watch a Thor 3 or something and have most of the dialogue be explanation to catch people like me up to speed. That is just not a good time to me. However, every now and then I'll kind of engage and it is like watching people trapped in roles a little bit because they know it's, I mean, why turn down the opportunity to be in a Marvel movie? However, every now and then I'll kind of engage in, it is like watching people trapped in roles a little bit because they know it's, I mean, why turn down the opportunity to be in a Marvel movie?

You get a lot of visibility as an actor, you make lots of money. Why turn down the opportunity to work as a visual effects designer for Marvel or Disney? It's like, if you grew up on those movies, you really liked them a lot. Sounds like a pretty good gig. They obviously should be paid more and get better benefits, but it's like at the very least that's on the resume. a pretty good gig. They obviously should be paid more and get better benefits, but it's like at the very least, that's on the resume. Looks pretty good. I understand why people do it, but it does sort of feel like the outside looking in, like people not being able to say no, they feel almost, it almost seems like they are trapped in this corporate system from which they can't escape. Maybe that's selling them short or something. But you do have to wonder, who is enjoying this? If the fans are dedicating whole podcast episodes to picking apart the latest reboot, and the people making it, as you say, are not having

a great time either, then who is this for? And it does start to feel a little bit like the bitter medicine. I don't care if you're feeling nostalgic. You're going to take this medicine. We're going to cure you with these leeches or whatever to get that emotion out of you. And it's kind of the same, it's sort of feels like the same thing. You know, it's like, I don't care if you don't like it, you're going to, you know, consume and experience these products, as you say, that we have some sort of tie to in history, because it's good for you. And it's the right thing to do to not, you know, maybe you're in too much for the past. And you and I both know that yearning for the past has its own problems, you know, and we see it at the political level all the time. But it's also

equally problematic to try to eliminate an emotion out of people. That historically has proven to be pretty disastrous. It almost feels like it works in a sense though, right? Because you have them releasing these products, we get less interested in it. Our nostalgia for the original then erodes along with it because it's just been so overexploited. And you can't just go back to the old ones without thinking about all the other kind of crap that's associated with it now that's been created. You talked about the political level here, right? I think that's a good opportunity to kind of pivot what we were talking about, because we do see these political nostalgic narratives playing out very frequently in our politics right now, whether that is obviously the Make America Great Again, the most notable one from Donald Trump, and those similar sorts of arguments or narratives being used by right-wing and far-right figures, you know, in many countries now. But then you also have politicians like Bernie Sanders and some more

left-wing politicians saying, you know, there was kind of like a pre-neoliberal time that was better than now before so many of our institutions and public services were eroded that, you know, we should go back to or something, or at least to draw attention to how things used to be different to use that as an argument to be able to do something different into the future. So how do you see both, you know, the deployment of nostalgia into the political realm, but also how the foreverizing that you're talking about takes a different form than what we would associate with nostalgia. It gets tricky because Make America Great Again is so obviously a nostalgic appeal. I've written about this, and so I have countless others. When I started to think about, well,

let's think about what foreverism looks like at a political level. Well, if it's like it is at the cultural level, what it does is it tries to eliminate the conditions for nostalgia or at the very least eradicate it after its outbreak, if you will, to use viral metaphors here. And so for me, when I think about something like Make America Great Again, what it is saying is it's implying not just that the past was somehow great and therefore you should be nostalgic for this version of the past. It's also saying we need to revive that nostalgic version of the past that I've told you that you should be interested in. I, as Donald Trump or whoever the political right-wing person is, I'm the one who's actually going to do that. If you've put your trust in me and vote for me, then I can actually get us back there. When we get back there, we don't have to be nostalgic anymore because we're there. We've done it. We've made it great again. And now we don't have to, we don't have, there is no more

yearning. It is itself kind of a promise to eliminate. It's almost like an inducement of nostalgia. And then the, and then here's the cure behind it. So for me, I think looking at it as a nostalgic appeal is kind of part of it. The dangerous part of it to me is the implication that that sort of framing of the past can be revived, kept in place, and not gotten rid of. And I do think that there are a number of right-wing individuals who support Trump who would be completely fine with him or an AI version of him, like a Foreverize version of him, being in office forever. Because then it would be completely fine with him or an AI version of him, like a ForeverEyes version of him, being in office forever. Because then it would be like, there's no more of the negative feelings that we bought into by supporting this candidate, not to mention all the other reasons

why they would support Donald Trump, including protection of their interests, corporate interests or otherwise. I do think that that to me is sort of a foreverized promise. I'll bring it back and we'll leave it there and seal it into place. And then we won't have to worry about longing for the great America that disappeared. What do you see in the relationship between nostalgia and the fact that I feel like for a long time now, people have felt like socially, we as a people, as a society have been kind of stuck. It doesn't feel like things are getting better. It doesn't feel like that has been happening for a long time. It feels like progress is something that has been completely eliminated, even though the tech industry will talk a lot about how they're moving things forward and innovating.

It doesn't really feel that just having like an iPhone 12 is really moving us forward at this point, right? So what do you make of that kind of feeling that this social stuckness and even in many cases, people feeling like they're going backwards, especially over the past couple of years where things have been getting so expensive, you know, interest rates have gone up, people's mortgages have become more expensive, all this kind of stuff. What do you make of the relationship between those kind of social factors and what you're talking about in this book? That's a great point. And it's something that I write about throughout the book, which is in the old days, when nostalgia

was first coined as this disease, it served as this foil to progress. And that's one of the main reasons why so many people were really concerned about this quote disease is that, well, this could actually be the destruction of a progressive civilization is if we long too much for the past, we can't move forward. That's it. And so nostalgia is like the one weapon that was guaranteed to destroy progress. Progress would be the one weapon to fight back against it.

What happened was over time is that like the belief in progress kind of, as you say, it like sort of dwindled a bit when it was like, well, you know, I feel stuck. It doesn't feel much like things are moving forward. I want things to be easier on me. I would like to be able to afford things as I get older. Framing something like the latest iPhone as a progressive move forward when it just doesn't really feel that way. And anyone who's purchased the new Mac product in the past however many years can definitely attest to that. Progress doesn't have the same ring as maybe it used to. And this is a big reason why we're thinking about this in the US right now, as we're entering into this next presidential election cycle. When candidates get on the

stage and talk a lot about progress, it doesn't quite hit like it used to. Plenty of people go like, yeah, right. And so when Donald Trump comes up and preaches this like anti-progress narrative, suddenly everybody sort of buys into it because it seems to make a bit more sense. And the promises of progress don't seem to match the experience of the daily lives of some people. And so instead, it's like, well, if progress isn't going to destroy nostalgia, this thing that's so threatening because it seems to thwart the forward momentum of a society, then there has to be another kind of weapon maybe to do that. Foreverism is kind of that weapon because what it does is it says we can seal things as they are and sort of freeze them in place. If there's change, it's very incremental.

iPhone 12, 13, 14, not much difference there. Okay. Political candidates get elected, not much changes. You know, it's like, we, we still don't have, you know, basic free and accessible healthcare in the United States. We've basically lost the right for people to, to get an abortion in the United States and all of these things sort of like change, but there's like almost like society as like slight updates, not as actually like progressive measures that make people's lives better. So the end result is that people do feel kind of foreverized themselves, sealed into place, and then they stay there from then on.

Absolutely. And it's incredibly worrying, right? And when you see people stuck in that position, you can understand how, you know, after being promised that things will get better for so long that they turn to a candidate who says, your problems or who we're to blame is somewhere else. You're not to blame and we will restore this wonderful past because you can't imagine a future that is better, we can at least kind of pull from what we know or assume we know, because usually these paths are kind of slightly fictionalized or quite fictionalized anyway, in order to just create an idea of something that would be appealing. But ultimately, this is in service of particular corporate interests. These same, what, foreverized or nostalgic political projects are often the same way. Of course, you know, we see nostalgia used on the left as well, but especially when we

look at these kind of growing fascist projects or at least extreme right-wing projects, you know, they promise to use the past in service of the public. But as we know, it's very much often in service of people much higher up the food chain. It's true. And any of these kinds of emotional appeals are, I mean, you see it with appeals to anger even. It's like I've written a lot about Donald Trump and nostalgia, but there's a lot that has been written and even more to be said about Donald Trump and anger. Anger is a human emotion. It has its own usefulness in certain contexts. I mean, plenty of people are angry about things that they should be angry about.

But anger can also be used in terrible ways and can ruin friendships and ruin countries, ruin groups, whole communities, and do a lot of harm. And so I think the point that I've been trying to, I guess, write about in the past two books has been the question of what to do with our emotions is a really important question. And to be able to recognize when an emotional pandering is occurring at the political level and be able to sort of know, is this the right time and the right context to employ that emotion? Or is it not? And in fact, it might be the time to be nostalgic for, like you said, like Bernie Sanders referencing maybe a pre-neoliberal era just in order to give attention to an alternative that might be hard to imagine in the present, but maybe there are

some of them that exist in the past that we can think about a bit more. Is it the right time to be nostalgic about that particular thing? And what is the goal in doing that? Or is this not the right time? And in fact, it needs to be a time of hope or forward thinking. And that's a really difficult thing to do when some of these emotions are constantly being targeted at the corporate level, at the political level, in order to create profits for somebody. And it's not typically middle class and working class folks. Yeah. And we've certainly seen that playing out for a long time now, you know, with that wealth being kind of siphoned off of regular people and brought right to the top. And of course, now we have people worth more than 100, 200 billion

dollars. I think even three Elon Musk might have hit at some point. It's ridiculous to even imagine that someone can hoard that much wealth and keep it away from everybody else when there's so much intense suffering that's happening. I wanted to pivot a little bit because you talk a lot in the book as well about the kind of digital infrastructures that make all of this possible, right? You talk about how there's this desire to store so much in these data centers, to even store our memories in the cloud and things like that. What do you make of that piece?

And how does that fit into this broader kind of idea or concept that you're laying out in this book? Well, yeah, and the term foreverism and like foreverizing, I came across the term foreverizing on a digital transfer company. I believe it was iMemories. You know, you have a number of these companies that what they do is they'll take old photographs, old VHS tapes, all this old like analog media

that's kind of supposedly decaying in the back of someone's closet and they digitize it. My family has done this, you know, and they've taken all the old home movies that were on VHS tape and they've sent them into one of these companies and now they have sort of access to them on an app and they can watch them or whatever. And iMemories called this process foreverizing. We don't just digitize your memories is what they said. We foreverize them. And I just thought that was so fascinating because obviously maybe they're trying to set themselves apart from the other companies. We do something better than just digitize them. My interest was in that particular word usage. They're essentially implying that the quote memories that you have saved in these analog devices are not going to last forever.

So if we digitize them, that will make them last forever. And not just that, but then you'll have more access to them. You don't have to dig out old VCRs or something to watch these tapes on. You can just pull up your phone, pull up the app, and then you've got instant access to the past. Again, it's like, why be nostalgic for your home movies when you could literally just watch them all the time on your phone with a few clicks. And so that's sort of what they're implying. These things will last forever. And yet we know, and anyone who studies digital infrastructure knows, something like the cloud or whatever is not at all guaranteed to be a last forever technology.

It's absolutely just as physical as a VHS tape or something. It's absolutely prone to breaches and deletions, you know, so why would we associate the digital with the forever? And that's the big kind of thing that I kind of writing about in that particular book. It's interesting to me, because when you think about these data centers, they're not something that lasts forever at all, right? And we know this very clearly in the sense that they rely on a lot of resources in order to keep themselves going. You know, you obviously have the computer parts that need to go in. And I think a lot of people don't realize that these computer parts need to be cycled in and out very frequently in these data

centers. There's a lot of waste that comes out of it. And we don't have proper recycling for a lot of this stuff, you know, it isn't happening. And then on top of that is the things that I feel like people have been talking more and more about, especially in the past year with the AI stuff, is the water usage of these data centers, the energy use of these data centers, and how these things are growing enormously. And I think one of the things that has been kind of in my mind recently, but really came back to me as I was reading your book, was how when it comes to digitization and when it comes to the idea of the cloud, we have this idea that everything should be in the cloud, that we should be kind of saving everything that is on the internet. Everything should be backed up. Everything should be stored. And I've been beginning to wonder, and it continued while I was reading your book, whether that really makes sense, whether everything really needs to be saved. When we think about other mediums, yes, we save some things, but not all of it. Yeah, it's true. And one of the questions I pose in the book is, how do we determine

the things that need to be saved and the things that don't need to be saved? And one of the ways that anywhere from Amazon down to the digital transfer companies like iMemories, one of the ways that they justify the saving of everything is by framing the information and content that we produce as quote memories. And that can be a very like anxiety inducing feeling to be like, what if I lose my memories? Well, who would want to do that? So then if we frame them as memories, then they become this thing that needs to be saved, even though a memory comes and goes. And so it's not only using that term to justify saving everything, but also it's a slight redefinition of the term itself.

Memory as not just something that comes and goes and is renegotiated and changes throughout one's life, but also something that remains static and accessible. In a way, it is a foreverization of not just the content, but of the idea of memory itself. I ought to be able to have access to my past or to any past, be able to pull it up at a moment's notice and engage with it. And again, if we start with the definition of nostalgia as a feeling experienced when we actually don't have constant access to the thing we're nostalgic for, then it is in a sense kind of a way to keep that feeling at bay. Here's the past, your past, at a moment's notice. The end result, however, still might not

eliminate nostalgia because as you probably know as well as I do, if I go a little too deep in my photos on my phone or on Instagram or something, I'm encountering the past. It is within reach. And yet, the nostalgia still doesn't quite go away. I still might begin to long for it. There's also the other issue of having everything saved means there is the possibility that one might not access it as much simply because it's more of an archival impulse. I've got it all saved and it's almost like trying to find what to watch on Hulu or Netflix, too many options and therefore no way to make a decision with that much information saved. It almost, you know, when my parents digitize their home movies for the first week or so,

they really were on their app a lot watching the home movies. And then they stopped because there were too many. I'm guessing there's probably a subscription that they have to keep paying in order to access the videos. I'm sure. I think what you said about memory is so interesting, right? Because for me, and, you know, I wonder how many other people think this. But when I think about my memories from when I was younger, like, you know, often memory is this thing that we recognize kind of fades over time, right? And that not everything kind of gets preserved up in the brain because the brain isn't actually a computer and doesn't just have this kind of infinite memory or whatever. But some things stay current and other things fade away. And sometimes there might

be something that kind of triggers the return of some memory that you forgot was stored away there somewhere in your head, right? But I feel like when I think about my memories, especially of when I was younger, sometimes I find myself wondering, is this a memory of something that I observed myself? Or is this a memory of a home video I watched one time that I'm remembering and that now I feel like is a memory itself? And so it does almost make you wonder, like, how does the kind of mediation of technology or how does our engagement with technology change the way that we think about memory, that memory works? You know, not to say that I think our memories are extending to the cloud or something like that, but just how having access to these things in perpetuity and having kind of all of these photos and all these

videos always available to us changes the way that we remember our own lives. Because obviously, we're getting very specific pictures of it when we look at kind of versions of what we have saved through capturing it with our phones or whatever. That's been something I've thought about for a while as well. And I wrote a bit about that in the previous book, The Hours We Lost Through Clock, about to what extent do images and photographs and just the media representations of our past that save our past, to what extent do they actually shape our memories? And I have this as well. And I have a number of memories that I know or can suspect are actually just me having watched some home video or something when I was really young. And yet I still kind of see that as a memory.

To me, it's hard for me to distinguish between false and true memories easily because to some extent, even the event that I experienced firsthand, whatever it might've been from the past is itself kind of like, as I grow older, it changes to meet my needs, whatever those might be. And then they may come and go. And in some ways that's just as almost false, if you will, than having experienced it by watching or seeing a photo. I don't know if that makes sense. But the sheer volume of information, our quote, memories that are saved, will either force us to kind of see our past in a different way,

because that's just the way it would work, or because there's so much information, we might not access it at all. And it might even actually create even maybe like a blind spot in our memory. This is something that I thought about when I read that book, The End of Forgetting by Kate Eichhorn. Kate makes the argument, a person is, by the time they're 18, they have this data trail of theirs that extends back to even the moment before they

were born, if maybe their parents or their guardians were posting about them before they were even born. And so, you know, she says that at a certain point, we may reach a point where, you know, the ability to forget the past and move on, which for some people might be good. They might want to, you know, distance themselves from a part of their past that wasn't really them or they didn't like, or they grew out of, might become more difficult. But it's also equally true that that information can also disappear very quickly. Because it is digital, it's not necessarily forever. A targeted assault on all of the metadata centers to try to get rid of your data off of all the

different servers at once, so it's not backed up. Yeah, I think that's a really fascinating kind of conversation. And just to think about kind of the broader ramifications of these things when it comes to memory or anything else. But this has been a really fascinating conversation. And to close it off, I just wanted to ask you, like, where do you see this kind of foreverizing impulse going? And do you think that this is something that we ultimately need to challenge? And if so, you know, how do you think that this is something that we ultimately need to challenge? And if so, how do you see us being able to do that? I do wonder at the cultural level to what extent fans and consumers alike will reach or have already reached a breaking point with

foreverized content. I try to ask my students this a lot, like, what is your opinion of this kind of endless rebooting of movies and series? And a lot of them are pretty exhausted by it at this point. And that wasn't always the case back when I was younger around their age. It wasn't always that way. There was, at least in my circle, a big blatant embrace of the rebooting. Yes, it's back. Can you believe it?

I don't always get that with the generation that I'm teaching now. So there could be a bit of a shift away from the desire to consume reboots and franchises and intellectual property universes simply because it's one's duty to do that or something. One must see the latest installment in Marvel or whatnot. And if that happens, it could lead to a bit of a corporate slowdown of the production of those pieces, but maybe not. And then at the political level, I just think it's important to recognize that when some of these nostalgic appeals are made that seem blatantly nostalgic at first, they are. But what makes them even more dangerous than that

is the fact that the promise is not just to like, hey, remember that there was this period in the past that was great. The danger of it is the promise that like, we can retool the present to be like that again and then nobody has to worry or long for that past anymore. That to me is the dangerous thing. And I think that plenty of people on the

left recognize that. But I think what often happens is that, and I've done this too, is I'll go for the jugular of like, well, it's just nostalgia, you know? And instead stopping and being like, there's a much more nuanced approach to this that I think would be more beneficial for us. And that is recognizing that the goal of the emotion and the context in which the emotion is expressed is much more important to think about than just the emotion itself, which can be used in a variety of different ways. And I'm not just talking about nostalgia. I'm talking about happiness, anger, sadness, all of these human emotions.

What is the goal of employing that emotion in political discourse? And is it to benefit people like regular middle and working class folks, or is it to pad the pockets of billionaires? And that's something that I think we have to keep asking. Yeah, I think those are important questions to keep in mind. And it's been really fantastic to dig into this with you, to have you back on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. Absolutely. Thanks so much. Grafton Tanner is the author of Foreverism and teaches at the University of Georgia. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership

with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

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